Let’s be honest: it’s a bit of a mystery why KORG has’t already shipped a mixer. KORG volca series customers seem to snap up every single volca model the Japanese maker can cook up. That leaves them with a bunch of toys with stereo minijacks and no way to mix them together other than buying compact mixers by the likes of Behringer and Mackie.

So, what we’re looking at here is either an actual leaked image of an upcoming KORG volca mix, or someone’s mock-up of what they wish that would be. Either way, same result: yeah, you probably kind of want this. (As spotted on the unofficial volca Facebook group, which is a great resource. KORG, if this is real, apologies, but… yeah, on the Internet, once things have leaked, it’s done.)

It’s certainly possible this is a mock-up made by someone outside KORG. Making good-looking renders is something anyone with some basic technical background can do, and there are a lot of talented people out there. There’s no way to know until there’s an official announcement. I’ll leave it to you to speculate.

If this isn’t what KORG is planning, it sure seems to be a no-brainer set of features that would fit perfectly with the company’s DNA and its volca line. I kind of think it is a genuine leak. But… if it’s not, KORG, go make this, please, and apparently you can have yet more of our money.

Here’s how much Slovak label LOM loves field recordings and strange sounds: they didn’t just stop with releasing a few wild experimental ambient albums. They’ve gotten into the boutique mic business. They’re creating new hardware that lovingly captures electro-magnetic fields. They’re printing t-shirts with custom designs to show their passion in illustrated form.

These are people who are really passionate about recording.

And you can get bit by the same addiction. Let’s have a look at what they’re offering.

By way of follow up to our chat with Daniele Antezza yesterday, his Inner8 live act with sYn will meet up with another audiovisual collaboration – Susanne Kirchmyer (Electric Indigo), with visualist Thomas Wagensommerer. That takes place at Berlin’s Krake Festival next week, which means we get an extensive conversation with the two artists alongside a canal in the video below.

They talk at length about aesthetics, collaboration, and connections to artistic practice:

But now that we’ve had you doing a lot of reading and watching of things this week, let’s get some music. It’s always a pleasure to listen to Susanne’s music, as her knowledge base is so deep and broad – if it’s experimental or if it’s club or if it’s composition and sound art, she’s been more or less doing all of it at the edge of what’s possible for a quarter century. So, as usual, her latest podcast is a field guide to some of the best production work going on in a bit of each of those genres, with dark experimental club sounds woven throughout. Listen: Continue reading »

Daniele Antezza and Federico Nitti are seated in a patch of grass in the park, lost in reflection like giddy monks.

The conversation turns to archaic geometries from lost civilizations, then to how to let loose unstable configurations of sound, then how to sweep away a party crowd in the whole experience. But, perhaps true to his Mediterranean roots, Daniele’s favorite English word for describing the elements of his work is “taste.”

Inner8 is the project for people whose flavor palette turns to the experimental. Daniele is known to techno fans for his collaboration Dadub with Giovanni Conti. That act is a pillar of the sound of Stroboscopic Artefacts, and the two have a mastering operation – Artefacts Mastering – to match. If Dadub is the street-legal club operation, then, Inner8 is the wild concept car wildly tearing around a test track. And for full immersion, Daniele works with sYn – sound artist and visualist Federico Nitti – to add a live visual component.

Inner8 is both a record album and live show, and accordingly it’s on a label (Undogmatisch) that’s also an art collective and event series. The self-titled album arrived last week.

The record is I think one of the most interesting to be released this year. Far from the rambling experimental norm, here Daniele maintains a sense of focus, heart, direction. The complete record is ready to stream, and comes with a visual accompaniment employing the work of both sYn and artist collaborator Valentina Bardazzi.

Give the full record a listen (thank you, FACT):

We got to sit down with Daniele and Federico to talk signal routing, synesthesia and audiovisual process, and of course, name dropping Electro-Harmonix pedals and exploring the mysteries of the Moebius strip. Continue reading »

The sound world of Joey Blush (aka Blush Response) is far reaching, entering dark clouds of murky industrial, EBM, and techno, all with relentless forward-pushing grooves. But as we talk to him about how he connects his gear, we’re really looking at how he connects his thoughts.

At its best, whatever we’re doing with gear ought to be about our minds. It’s not just connecting a patch cord. It’s connecting an idea from one place to another – re-wiring neurons.

Synth legend Morton Subotnick spoke this week about that process, as he recalled first creating complex metric structures simply by patching together loops on hardware modular sequencers (there, via the Buchla). As rhythmic structures emerged, he blew his own brain open – and the landmark record Silver Apples on the Moon was born. And I thought of this:

“You’re sequencing the sequence!”

I heard a smiling Wouter Jaspers of KOMA Elektronik repeat that phrase like a Zen koan. His sequencer isn’t intended to be simple. It’s even called Komplex.

The Komplex sequencer has reached the final prototype stage, with a release in coming weeks. Joey Blush visited KOMA Elektronik in their studio to play with the Komplex and a host of modules.

And what’s significant about this is that it is a return to some of what Morton was talking about back in the 60s. This isn’t about something abstract; it’s getting hands-on, gestural control over sounds, so that there’s a direct line from your instinct to making some change in the sound by moving your body.

Literally, how is Joey making the connection? He sends over his signal flow to CDM, in terms of what you see in the KOMA video: Continue reading »

Can you think, dance, and dream at the same time? We get to debut a new video for Concubine, and it’s the perfect time to look at what this duo has accomplished in 2015.

Concubine, the project from Noah Pred and Rick Bull, is never cold, but it’s always expressing several sentiments simultaneously. It’s at once hypnotic and cerebral, visceral and abstract. Smartly-calibrated percussion politely swings atop future-prog funk flights of fancy. It’ll get a little cheeky, but within a song framework that’s been obsessively constructed. And the album itself is put together similarly. Driving dance tracks are effortless interspersed with ambient tracks that keep the dynamic energy moving – rather than feeling like incidental excursions. It is relentlessly high quality, always at a level of polish – music made by proper gentlemen who nonetheless know how to have a good time. By the time the synth sirens start going off in Entropia, you’re ready for a night out in Blade Runner’s Michelin-starred restaurant and … see where the night leads. Continue reading »